Global Agricultural Concept Scheme (GACS)

The Global Agricultural Concept Scheme (GACS) includes in its pool of interoperable concepts the identities related to agriculture from AGROVOC multilingual agricultural thesaurus (32,000 concepts), the CAB Thesaurus (140,000 concepts) and the NAL Thesaurus (53,000 concepts).

The latest GACS beta version provides mappings for the 10,000 most used concepts from the cited thesauri. Mappings were automatically extracted and then manually evaluated.

GACS acts as a bridge connecting AGROVOC, CAB and NAL thesauri that are maintained, respectively, by FAO of the United Nations, Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International (CABI) and US National Agricultural Library (NAL).

(Image credit: GACS. The collaborative integration of three thesauri)

The GACS terms and concepts are used for indexing the related sets of documents (from AGRIS, CAB Abstracts and Agricola) and merging the information described by the three mapped thesauri.

GACS beta is now in VocBench (a free, web-based, multilingual, editing and workflow tool that manages Knowledge Organisation Systems, KOS) for manual edit and maintenance, and is displayed for browsing using the SKOSMOS platform (watch: Publishing SKOS concept schemes with SKOSMOS). GACS data can be also freely downloaded.